Educational Orientation

LifeGoals Educational Orientation

The fate of our country depends on the character of its citizens.
Indeed, the primary goal of our American education system is to produce
good citizens. To this end, we must strive to prepare better citizens;
citizens who think clearly, make good decisions, care about others,
take responsibility for their actions, and treat fellow citizens with
respect - citizens that will be able to lead productive lives and
contribute responsibly to the greater good. America's education system
now stands at the brink of a monumental challenge: the development and
delivery of a curriculum designed specifically to produce better
citizens.

The basic issue is this: Too many of our children are making the
wrong decisions. We see one horrific example after another in the news
on a daily basis. There is a clear need to include forms of instruction
into the curriculum that address this fundamental societal issue. The
moral and ethical battle for the development of our children into good,
responsible citizens is being fought today for our very future as a
society. Consider four current societal trends:

The questionable images and messages being communicated by the media and entertainment industries;

The existence of poor-role-models for our children to emulate;

The sociological realities of increasing single parent and parent-absent households; and

Developing better citizens involves defining core issues. Our
fundamental belief is that good people who know how to think critically
are better participants in public affairs, better at identifying and
solving important problems, and better at communicating thoughtfully
and accurately. They are better parents, as well as better citizens. A
primary education objective then becomes the development of critical
decision-making skills. We are speaking here only about the process of
decision-making, and not about the content of what to think or decide.
This is a crucial distinction. We do not propose to tell people to
simply "do this and not that," "be better" or "act right," as most
character education curricula espouse. Rather, we plan to focus on the
very process of decision-making, and, very importantly, to teach them
the relevance of this critical thinking process to their lives. The
emphasis on "how", not "what" people decide.

One fundamental precept of teaching critical decision-making
requires anchoring our approach to the concept of personal
responsibility. It is assumed that people are responsible for both
intended and the unintended results of their actions. Therefore, all of
us have an obligation to think carefully before we act. If our children
are to become moral and ethical, they need to have tools they can apply
to any problem or choice, not just a set of rules for a set of
pre-specified circumstances.

Critical decision-making skills involve understanding the elements
of choice and are directed toward enabling people to achieve their own
personal goals. Linking decision-making skills with long-term goals
dramatically increases the quality of our choices. Goals, the things we
want to achieve, effectively act as a gyroscope, keeping us on-balance
and going in the right direction. Rational thinking, then, is the kind
of thinking we would do if we were aware of what is in our long-term
best interests. Stopping to think about our future interests, with
respect to our own personal goals, will help us make better
life-decisions. Put simply, we must make decisions and take actions
that will get us where we want to go, or, to be who we want to become.

Our children must be Goal-Oriented. Goals provide direction for
thinking and decision-making. Goals serve as the basis to choose among
possible courses of action. We need to teach our children to rationally
assess alternative choice options. By focusing our children on being
Goal-Oriented, combined with the skill of Option Development, we
provide a foundation to teach them a decision-making system they can
use the rest of their lives. This critical thinking skills approach
will produce GOOD Decisions

The importance of implementing critical thinking skills as quickly
as possible is dramatized by the time frame that defines an educational
generation. When asked, most people would say a generation is 20-25
years, the average time period before your children will have their
children. When applied to education this definition is wrong. Our view
is that an educational generation is precisely one year. The fact is
that every year we graduate another group of seniors from our high
schools that will go on to have children. Every year we delay in
producing good decision-makers, young adults with the ability to make
decisions that will enable them to be good parents and teachers of
their children. We are at risk of losing yet another generation.

We must begin early to teach our children to understand the
decision-making process, effectively starting with simple choices like
"brushing your teeth" and working through to more involved choices like
whether to "study" or "watch television" after school. Later they
analyze the even more serious choices like "who to select as friends",
"whether or not to take a gun to school." With training in
systematically making simple everyday decisions, our children will
learn the process of thinking that they can use later to deal with much
more complex life-problems. Interestingly, developmental psychologists
tell us that a schoolchild of seven or eight is capable of concrete
operational thinking, so we must prepare them with the basic concepts
of choice prior to that time. This means that the teaching of critical
thinking skills must necessarily begin no later than the first grade.